Collaborate with a Loved One Without Ruining Your Relationship

One of the most frequent questions we get about our book, The Progress Principle, isn’t about the content of the book or the research behind it. Rather, it goes something like this: “You guys wrote a book together, and you’re still married?!” Well, yes, we did, and yes, we are — for 23 years. Inevitably, that leads to questions about what it was like to work so closely together and how we managed it without ruining our marriage. Our glib answer is that it was “the best of times and the worst of times.” The best: sharing the excitement of discovery, developing new ideas, and realizing that it was all coming together (sometimes celebrated by a running-leap high five between 5’2″ Teresa and 5’11” Steve). The worst: agonizing over our disparate interpretations of the data during long dinner-table discussions until our daughter begged, “Can we please talk about something else now?”

The more nuanced answer is that, while there certainly are difficulties and risks in writing a book with someone you care deeply about, there are also advantages and unique rewards. In fact, if you look into what it takes to work closely with a loved one on a project like this, there are lessons for any creative collaboration between people who care about each other.

Take the brothers Tom and David Kelley, who recently completed the terrific book Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential within Us All. David founded both IDEO (one of the world’s top innovation and design firms) and the d.School at Stanford. Tom, an IDEO partner, joined the firm nine years after its founding. Although they have worked together at IDEO for 26 years and Tom has published previous books, this was the first time they attempted collaboration on a writing project. When we talked with Tom not long ago, he said, “The Creative Confidence book was our biggest collaboration ever, so of course, it had its ups and downs.” The stories he told us revealed much about their recipe for success.

First, start with a strong foundation and agree to protect it; maximize cooperation, minimize competition. “I love my brother,” Tom told us, “and it helps a lot that we have found our own paths through life, never competing against each other.” As children, they shared a bedroom and worked on many projects together. They never felt competitive toward one another, partly because of their four-year age difference and partly because they followed very different paths post-college — David in engineering and design, Tom in business and writing. When, in the early years of their time together at IDEO, they had their “one big fight” over IDEO’s strategy, David insisted that they resolve the conflict, saying, “I’ll do whatever it takes to fix this. Even if it means shutting down the firm.”

We, too, love each other. At the outset of our own project, we made a pact: If we ever felt that tensions over the book threatened our personal relationship, we would end the collaboration.

Second, at the outset, explicitly discuss similarities and differences in your cognitive and work styles; figure out a process that leverages your complementarities. Tom told us that “David is great at ‘bold strokes’ — big, inspiring ideas. I’m good at ‘long marches’ — crafting and re-crafting thousands of words on paper.” Having a great many stories in mind, accumulated over the brothers’ years of experience with creativity, Tom wanted to get right down to writing. Tom’s itch to dive in created the collaboration’s “most stressful moment,” because David was adamant about first developing a structure for the book. So they compromised. Tom spent a cathartic three months writing out every story, returning with a 100,000-word document that they could use as raw material for discerning the book’s main topics. This solution was just right for them because, in contrast to Tom, David, although a brilliant oral storyteller, “never wrote anything down.”

The process the Kelleys developed took advantage of each of their talents. Along with collaborator Corina Yen, whose engineering/journalism background was a bridge between David’s and Tom’s, they created each chapter’s skeleton by choosing one main topic, putting it at the center of a whiteboard, and then building a mind map around it. After a couple of hours, David would leave Tom and Corina to flesh out six or seven main themes. They would place each theme at the top of a piece of foam core, and then fill in the theme with various ideas from the whiteboard. Later in the week, David would come back in to help edit and rearrange the ideas, adding some new ones. Pieces of Tom’s early document got pasted under these themes, too. Eventually, Tom sat down and turned these boards into a coherent draft.

Finally, respect each other’s contributions. Although we used quite a different (and less ingenious) process than the Kelleys’, ours also involved contributions that couldn’t easily be equated. More like David, Steve is a big-ideas person; more like Tom, Teresa immerses herself in the data — the stories of our research participants — looking for patterns. Steve developed a loosely sketched first draft for most of our chapters; Teresa, the more fluent writer, added the flesh and wordsmithed the stories. It would have been easy for Tom and Teresa to become resentful that their partner wasn’t doing more of the actual writing, or for David and Steve to get frustrated with their partner’s focus on the details. But they didn’t, partly because of the love they shared with their partner, manifest in their up-front commitments to the relationship — but also because each member of the pair respects the other’s strengths.

Ultimately, collaborating successfully with a loved one comes down to following this basic rule for any people who want to both work effectively together and maintain a strong relationship: From the very beginning, figure out a process for leveraging each other’s strengths, compensating for each other’s weaknesses, and cooperating in a spirit of respectful kindness.